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The medieval franchise is transplanted to Crete, conjuring action-adventure magic from familiar ingredients
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Games — Lewis Gordon
The path in Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy is a familiar one. Amid ancient ruins and sun-dappled gorges, a young woman, Sophia, dutifully treads the same footsteps as a Minoan warrior from millennia ago, one with whom she seems to share a visionary connection. The “resonance” between these two characters is made clear by their echoing actions – a crank pushed in the bronze age that still works in the medieval present, for example. Through these spliced timelines, it becomes clear that Sophia, compelled by her supernatural gift, possesses little agency. Destiny beckons her forwards.
This is a smart meta concept for a game that, at its most basic level, boils down to keeping your left thumb planted firmly on the analogue stick, always pushing Sophia onwards in linear fashion. You jostle her through ornate corridors rendered as higgledy-piggledy pirate camps and cobbled Venetian streets. For the greater part of the game, you propel her through the Minoan remains of Crete, which harbour a dark and terrible secret. It is classic third-person action-adventure fare, building on the template laid down by the likes of Tomb Raider and then refined and complicated by titles such as The Last of Us . Little, from an interactive perspective, surprises: you dash, vault and swing between teetering podiums, squeeze through tiny gaps in rock and crouch behind conveniently placed walls to avoid enemies.
Yet the Bordeaux-based studio Asobo conjures magic from the familiar. Sophia, a supporting character from the second game in the A Plague Tale series, carries this swashbuckling adventure with aplomb. She is spiky and confident, the daughter of a wealthy mother and a smuggler father. The game starts with her as a young child, recently escaped from abuse in a nunnery, before cutting to roughly a decade in the future. Now in her 20s, Sophia is a capable, cut-throat fighter, on the hunt for the treasure that lurks deep inside the extensive cave network of Crete – the home, according to Greek mythology, of the bull-headed Minotaur.
In tone, Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy is a long way off the dour machismo of Christopher Nolan’s recent Odyssey adaptation . Rather than brooding, greyscale landscapes, Asobo delivers a Crete that, at least initially, seems lifted directly from holiday brochures: soft sandstone cliffs, swallows dancing in the evening light, vivid green vegetation tangling around crumbling statues. Some of the most striking sights arrive via the Minoan frescoes: their deep oranges and eye-popping yellows have not faded but remain ebulliently bright.
It is always a treat when the game pivots to this classical time period, briefly putting us in control of the warrior and letting us soak up the vibrant atmosphere through their eyes: crowds baying for blood; stands draped in textile finery; magenta-coloured flowers strewn across mosaic floors.
Related: A Plague Tale: Requiem review – rat-infested sequel raises stakes and spectacle
But, slowly, the world and story darken, though Asobo’s fascination with light – a means of warding off hordes of rats in prior A Plague Tale games – remains. Sophia carries a sphere that can reflect and refract light, crucial for solving environmental puzzles that often involve rotating supersized lenses to redirect beams. But these puzzles, like the platforming, are somewhat rudimentary, causing you to only briefly pause and ponder without ever yielding oh-so-satisfying “aha” moments. Rarely is there more than one solution or the opportunity to get creative: rather, you must follow the logic clearly signposted by the designers.
Although stealth is sometimes an option, often our champion must engage in hand-to-hand combat. The most memorable fights occur towards the game’s conclusion, in which swirling light causes calcified, zombie-like figures to disintegrate into dust, Sophia teeing up their demise with lethal slashes of her sword. These are some of the most dynamic melee encounters in the game’s roughly 12-hour run time: a balletic, show-stopping dance of light and movement.
Sophia may traipse a path similar to that of countless treasure-hunting, action-adventure video game classics – but for all the overfamiliar design choices, there is enough verve in the beguiling presentation and lively, compellingly drawn characters to elevate this beyond mere retread. Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy succeeds, in large part, because of Sophia, a heroine who confronts history head on, before finally breaking free of it in apocalyptically spectacular style.
• Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy is released 27 August
This is a smart meta concept for a game that, at its most basic level, boils down to keeping your left thumb planted firmly on the analogue stick, always pushing Sophia onwards in linear fashion. You jostle her through ornate corridors rendered as higgledy-piggledy pirate camps and cobbled Venetian streets. For the greater part of the game, you propel her through the Minoan remains of Crete, which harbour a dark and terrible secret. It is classic third-person action-adventure fare, building on the template laid down by the likes of Tomb Raider and then refined and complicated by titles such as The Last of Us . Little, from an interactive perspective, surprises: you dash, vault and swing between teetering podiums, squeeze through tiny gaps in rock and crouch behind conveniently placed walls to avoid enemies.
This report is published with credit to theguardian.com. Full available text from the wire is above. Read on theguardian.com →
Source: theguardian.com · Lewis Gordon. Published 27 Aug 2026, 12:00 pm.
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